Story Competition 2017 Winners - Aged 7 and under

1st Place - Flo Taylor

The Beauty of Colour

I was only three years old but I can remember it so well.

Drip,drip,drip, rain,rain,rain. It was a wet soggy day. I sneaked out of the house with my raincoat and umbrella to make a den under a tree. I started to play fairies lying in the sticky wet leaves. I looked down and I squealed.

There was something slimy crawling on my foot. What was it? Mum heard me screaming and came out to see what was the matter. “Look Mum. There’s a slimy, hairy, yucky thing crawling on me. It’s horrible.”

“That’s not horrible. That’s just a caterpillar,” Mum said. I looked closely at the dull brown body moving its way along my boot. It really was horrible. Carefully Mum picked up the caterpillar and took it inside. I followed her and she put it into a pot with some fresh green leaves.

For days I watched that caterpillar nibbling on those leaves. A brown lump in a pot getting fatter and fatter. One day it stopped still. It wasn’t moving any more. I remember feeling a bit sad. Mum told me it would be O.K. and just wait and see.

I remember the flapping colours wizzing around the pot so fast they were all blurry…red, orange, yellow, indigo. I remember being amazed how a horrible hairy brown thing could turn into something so beautiful, so colourful. I remember Mum saying I had to let it go into the wild. I remember feeling sad again.

2nd Place - Nina Rowlands

Emotional Dresses

Once there was a young, kind, woman who was very proud about her dresses for one strange reason. You see, she could not speak so the dresses told people how she was feeling. One day she could not stand some smelly old socks so as if by magic a red dress appeared. She was really angry! When she was happy she wore a yellow dress and when she was sad she wore a blue dress.

One day when she was sleeping a naughty robber came into the room and stole all her emotional dresses! The police came as fast as an ambulance for someone who is about to die but it was too late. The sneaky robber had vanished, along with all her dresses. In replacement now in her wardrobe were some wretched old clothes. These clothes could not show how she was feeling.

Next morning was the woman’s birthday. Her daughter made a birthday breakfast. She really liked the cake but her daughter did not think so because she was wearing a green skirt. She said she would never do breakfast for her mum again. On Tuesday her friend took her to the movies to watch a lovely film but because she had to wear a green cardigan her friend thought she found it disgusting. All week she became sadder and sadder every day because no one could understand how she was feeling.

On Saturday there came a really bright sparkle inside the room. For a minute everything was silent until standing before her was a beautiful fairy with a humungous golden crown. “Hello”, the fairy said. “You look down and I know why. From now on you will be able to speak and live happily and you won’t need your emotional dresses anymore.”

The wonderful end.

3rd Place - Ummayyah Tafazal

The Beauty of Colour

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Stacey. She found a butterfly, it was blue, purple, pink and yellow. She played with the butterfly running behind it in the garden. She really wanted to have a pet butterfly. She asked her mum if she could keep the butterfly. Her mum said it wasn’t a good idea because butterflies like to fly about. But she was naughty and didn’t listen to her mum. She put the butterfly in a glass jar and closed the lid and put it in her room. The butterfly tried to get out, but couldn’t. Stacey went down for dinner and watched TV, she forgot about the butterfly. At bed time she came back up to her room and the butterfly was dead.

Stacey was sad. But an amazing thing happened. When she returned the butterfly to the garden, she saw thousands of caterpiller eggs. Stacey wanted to look after them and everyday gave them water and lots and lots of leaves. The caterpillers became bigger and bigger and built cocoons. Then one day all the thousands of caterpillars turned into butterflies, they were pink, blue, purple, green, orange, brown, red and yellow. They were small and big with different patterns on their wings. Stacey was happy that she could help the baby caterpillers become butterflies that flew around in her garden.